


Growing Things Where They Just Don’t Grow

by thatsrightdollface



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, Hope, Introspection, Light Angst, Starting again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-11-09 01:40:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17992406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Luther had named the plant on his desk in the moon base, and he tried to carry it with him to earth when the call came.





	Growing Things Where They Just Don’t Grow

**Author's Note:**

> Hi~~ I hope you're having a nice day. Thanks for reading this, if you do - I ALSO hope you enjoy it. :D I have a lot of feelings.
> 
> Also: when I first saw the plant on Luther's desk, I thought it looked like a Mimosa pudica... But looking back to check, I saw no - the leaves don't have the right fringe thingies. But I kinda liked the idea of it, so I just made this a mysterious new variation???? We know Reginald Hargreeves experiments with living things, so. Mm. 
> 
> Aaaanyway. Sorry for any and all mistakes I might've made!!! Thank you!!!

**Hello again.**

 

Luther had named the plant on his desk in the moon base, and he tried to carry it with him to earth when the call came.  Who knew when he’d be able to get back and water it, right?  He packed it up as snugly as he could and tapped a finger so, so lightly against one of its leaves.  After a second of consideration, the leaf shivered and folded into itself, which might’ve been like it was always pulling away...  But Luther liked to think it could be a sort of wave, too. There was something to be said for acknowledgement, at least.  This was one of his dad’s variations on the Mimosa Pudica plant, anyway, so the twitching movements were par for the course. “Sensitive plant,” the thing was called. “Shameplant.”  The original, anyway.  Luther had been growing them for a while now.  He’d heard they could get pretty big, but none of his had managed that yet. Maybe it was the moon base air, or the style of pot he’d bought before coming here.  Maybe this just wasn’t the sort of place – sort of life, sort of dark cramped room – that went easy on growing things.

Some people called Mimosa Pudica a weed.  Maybe Luther loved it more, knowing that.  At the very least, he loved that even with his huge, almost-stranger’s hands – hands that might surprise his siblings, surprise Allison in a way that got her pulling away, too, with a worried smile on – he hadn’t crushed his plant, yet.  The moon base was so small, it was sometimes difficult not to move too quickly inside it.  Not to crumple the walls, or stumble into the machinery and hear it finally splinter.  You know.

Some places go gently on living things, and some don’t.  Plants couldn’t be too picky about where their roots went down.

Luther was getting more used to his new skin all the time, he told himself.  He _also_ told himself that he never even questioned answering the call back to earth for his father’s funeral, no matter what happened next.  No matter what seeing everybody again would be like…  No matter what made him feel sort of sick, a pit of hurt and worry that he tried to swallow down with what remained of his soy paste rations as well as he could.  It was almost true – the Umbrella Academy’s Number One took orders from their father and distributed them to everyone else.  He returned when he was called, and he didn’t talk back.  Luther took orders.

Luther packed his plant up to visit earth, its far-off, never-before-seen homeworld – (‘cause he’d planted the seeds on the moon, he sometimes wondered if that made his plants the first ever moon-born natives) – and he tried to believe his father had left him some sort of message back at the family house.  Maybe there’d be something waiting on his old too-small bed, or folded up in Pogo’s jacket pocket.  Probably Pogo at least would be happy to see him, Luther decided.  _Definitely_ Pogo, but how about anybody else…?

Whenever Luther thought about his not-quite-human arms, he reminded himself that maybe no one would see, could know, might snicker behind their familiar hands when he turned his back.  Whenever Luther re-realized that he wasn’t sure what his family – _his father_ – might expect from him at a time like this, he reminded himself that the words would probably come the way his plans had, back in the day.  Sometimes halting, sometimes tangled or the sort of thing that would get Diego rolling his eyes at him, but at the very least solid and _there_.

Luther’s plant didn’t make it long, on earth.  He set it up on his childhood desk, and blending those two familiar things – the room and his little plant – had made them both seem stranger.  But still, he’d left to make his way through the house…  Through his new role…  And when he came back the poor little guy had splattered apart on the floor.  Something had knocked the pot over.  Luther wasn’t sure what, and maybe he didn’t want to know.  Would it have made him feel angry?  Guilty?  What?

Luther crouched over and gathered the plant up, sweeping soil and roots into his hand.  He hoped the back of his coat wouldn’t split open across his shoulders, just then…  He hoped Allison wouldn’t turn up at just that second, walking past the door and maybe thinking he’d smashed something fragile and innocent in a rage.  He repotted the Mimosa Pudica variant in a planter Pogo found for him, but by then it was too late.  The plant shriveled into something miserable too soon.  They really _were_ sensitive, those plants, especially the way his father had been growing them.  Surprisingly sensitive, for a weed.

Some places were unkind to growing things, sure, sure, but the Hargreeves’ house was surrounded by so much life.  Luther’s breath had caught in his throat, coming home to the grass, the swaying trees, the mud.  All of it.

It was so much.  It had been too long.

 

**And the shameplant’s name was...**

 

…  Something friendly, and simple, and safe.

Something like Luther imagined parents might name their kids, out in the real world where people’s names didn’t usually get shouted in the middle of supervillain battles.

Something like he imagined Allison might name her next child, her second child, if there was going to be one.  He wouldn’t have wanted to admit he’d ever tried to guess.

Luther had sent Allison a gift and a letter when her daughter was born, but after he’d packed it all up – the mobile of the solar system (he was Spaceboy, after all, even still), and the books and hair ribbons and that set of kiddy Umbrella Academy-themed playing cards – he had felt so dumb.

Many, many years ago, there had been board game sessions when Luther and the rest of the Umbrella Academy hadn’t been training for battle.  Chipping away at games of Monopoly a strict half-hour at a time…  Trying to convince Klaus and Diego that gambling with neighbor kids through an illicit hole in the fence was probably a bad idea.  Sometimes they’d snuck out to get donuts in the middle of the night, too, frosting staining Luther’s teeth and Allison laughing, running so her hair bounced behind her.  They had been all lit up by moonlight, then, and Luther had let himself believe things would feel so put-together for all time.  He could ignore the burning blister of the Umbrella Academy tattoo on his wrist, he’d thought.  He could ignore the bruises and snapped bones and casts no one was supposed to sign in case he had to pose for magazine photographs.  He was fighting evil, after all.  He was saving the world.

Luther had been able to look down over the dunes by his moon base, down at earth in all its distant stillness, and imagine that same old street gone silvery and dreamlike.  Warm in the summer air, only empty now.

It was a way not to remember how long it had been since he’d gotten any new orders from his father, anyway.  New orders, or food, or…  Huh.  Anything from earth and those moonstruck streets at all.  It was something else to think about.

 

**That was what it’s supposed to be like, right?**

 

Belonging.  Those memories of running through the darkness to duck back into his dad’s manor, rubbing donut crumbs off his hands into the grass.  Being part of a team.  Checking over his shoulder to make sure everyone was okay, and seemed to be having fun, and Klaus hadn’t gotten cornered by any weirdo ghosts at the church cemetery yard down the street from the donut place again.  Sometimes it was hard to believe there’d been a Luther Hargreeves who did that sort of thing like it was ordinary.  Who knew Allison would be wearing the necklace he’d gotten her; who trusted he’d be missed if he couldn’t go out on a mission with everybody else someday.

By the time he had met up with Allison again in these new lives, in this world without his dad, in his new shuffling body that never seemed to hold itself the way he wanted, anymore, Luther could think of a dozen different things he could’ve used as a greeting instead of “Where are Patrick and Claire?”

He had wanted to prove that Allison’s husband and daughter mattered to him – that he remembered their names.  He had thought that would matter to Allison, too, just the way her remembering a comet-inspired poem he’d sent his father along with the latest reports would have mattered so much to him.  Maybe Allison hadn’t read any of that poetry, or seen any of the photos he took, or asked after him at all.  But that couldn’t change the fact that he remembered her husband and her daughter, and he worried about her.  Luther’d watched some of her movies, even…  Some of the more recent ones, too, back when shipments were still coming from his dad regularly enough that they could use the space for something like that.  Pogo had slipped them in, probably.

It was strange to imagine Allison without people around that loved her.  Allison traveling alone.  Luther had been curious, and wary, and wondering what sort of distance she expected from him.  Whether he could still make her laugh, poking fun at Diego’s costume or something.  Whether she’d look at him like he made her uncomfortable, now, or shake her head when he tried to tell her she was beautiful.

“I missed you,” Luther could have opened with.  The way his breath stuttered reminded him of how he’d felt first seeing trees, again, and all the world alive.

“My favorite was the one where you played the marine biologist who studied that bioluminescent monster thing,” Luther could’ve said.  “Movie, I mean.  It’s nice to see you.”  Or something like that, only ironed out and polished and spoken with an easy smile.  He liked to imagine Allison expected him with an easy smile, and not as uptight as others might say.

Maybe it hadn’t been great, getting Allison talking about her divorce right away – reminding her she’d lost custody of her daughter, even if she _had to know_ he was on her side through all of it.  Even if he was the one hinting about how she could bend the world to her will, speak a rumor into truth.  Get what she wanted, and be happy.  Please, please, be happy.

Maybe it hadn’t been great, reminding Allison how far away he was all the time, either.  How he couldn’t know – couldn’t understand – her world, anymore.  But that was how it had gone, anyway, and she’d looked at Luther as if she still knew him, obviously still knew him, and explained just a little of how things had gone wrong with wide eyes and a wavery voice.  It was sort of like she had been waiting for someone to confess to.

Like she had been waiting for Luther, even after all this time.  Even after all the many ways she’d shown she wasn’t waiting for him at all.

Talking to Allison felt like it used to, and it didn’t.  Felt like something familiar grown from a new seed.  New selves planted in old, waiting soil.  Maybe it was enough that she’d smiled at him again, and met his eyes at least a couple times instead of just staring at his layers of clothing, swallowing back questions.  Allison had taken steps towards him, too, as if something in him could mean belonging for her, still.  Warm streets at night and donut powder and the thought that they never had to be alone.

That couldn’t be right, Luther reminded himself.  He reminded himself of so many things all the damn time.

 

**Of course you wouldn’t know.**

 

He tried again, though.  At night, after they’d danced alone but together and broken Ben’s statue and let ashes that should have felt practically sacred drop into wet seeping earth.  Luther tried again, because he couldn’t think of what else to do.  Because he wanted to believe things could work out well, sometimes.  It was by a dim lamp and crouched beneath those toy planes hung too low on the ceiling.  His room, Spaceboy’s room, both more and less _his_ than the moon base could have been.  It felt impossible to be sleeping here again with some of the others waiting just down the hall.  Impossible, like a cruel joke…  Like the sort of daydream Luther’d scolded himself into giving up even before his new skin, even before his accident.

He’d planted some new seeds – the same variant of Mimosa Pudica, originally harvested from a plant on the moon.  Strangers to this world, the same way he might have been, by now.  He’d planted them in dark soil and propped his head on his arm.  Closed his eyes.


End file.
